In this next "Med Life with Dr. Horton" podcast, Dr. Jillian Horton talks with both Dr. Deepu Gawda and actor Alan Alda.

In the first segment, Dr. Horton and guest Dr. Deepu Gawda, internist and associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, answer a listener question from a physician who is under so much work pressure that s/he is viewing patients only as units of time. This person wants to get back to connecting with patients in a meaningful way and is looking for advice.

In the second segment, Dr. Horton speaks with award-winning actor Alan Alda, who leads workshops for physicians through the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. They discuss how doctors can focus less on pressure from the "system" to be more time efficient and instead be more present for patients. They also talk about ageism in medicine.

Dr. Jillian Horton is a general internist in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was the associate dean of undergraduate student affairs at the University of Manitoba from 2014–2018 and now directs programs in wellness and medical humanities at the Max Rady College of Medicine.

Send the anonymous questions that keep you up at night to a real former Associate Dean of Medical Student Affairs, Dr. Jillian Horton, and get the perspective you need with no fear of judgment. Submit your questions anonymously through this form, and mention "Dr. Horton Podcast."

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I witnessed the dehumanization of the medical profession firsthand.
Because I was interested in the scientific approach to psychotherapy started by Freud, I began psychiatric residency at the Montreal General Hospital in 1957, and discovered that talking to patients, taking a history, revealed the cause of their symptoms, and obviated the need for all the psychiatric drugs which were flooding the market.
The exception was chlorpromazine which helped acutely psychotic patients to become lucid in a few days. I thought this would lead to therapy helping the patient to understand why this had happened.
But instead this led psychiatry to assume that emotional problems were due to chemical imbalances and to the administration of toxic drugs which often made insight oriented therapy more difficult.
When we finally discovered that even psychotic patients could become well by understanding and working through early trauma, psychiatry was so used to relying on drugs that they couldn’t listen, and the epidemic of mental illnesses increases.